Antoine Didienne and his company have been a part of San Diego and La Mesa Fair Trade for many years. His company,
Vavavida has tabled each year at the annual La Mesa Fair Trade Gift Faire.
On July 28,2015 Union Tribune reporter Carla Peterson, featured Antoine in her "Making a Difference" column.
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| Antoine Didienne, center, who helped start a jewelry-making class for
refugee women as part of Project Concern International's Women Empowered
Initiative, sat for a portrait with Lisa Bain, PCI program manager,
left, and jewelry designer and volunteer teacher Jennifer Housman,
right.
— John Gastaldo |
He
has been a tech-company worker, an account executive in a
communications firm and a web entrepreneur. But the job that sent
Antoine Didienne’s work-life path in a whole new direction has a
one-word title and contract that will not be running out anytime soon.
“It
sounds corny, but since I became the dad of a daughter, I wanted to
make the world a better place for her and for all women,” said the
38-year-old Didienne, the father of Nyla (who is almost 6) and the
expectant father of a daughter due in November. “I thought that I really
wanted to be an example for my daughter. I wanted to be someone she
could look up to.”
The world-improvement plan started three years ago with the launch of the online shopping site
Vavavida. The site – which Didienne co-founded with his University of San Diego
classmate Daniel Amaro and Daniel’s mother, Linda – specializes in
jewelry and accessories made by fair-trade companies, most of which
employ and support women.
Next, Didienne and the Amaros began donating a portion of the company’s proceeds to
Project Concern International,
a San Diego-based nonprofit that has been working with the world’s most
vulnerable communities since 1961. Then Didienne and his company took
their relationship with Project Concern to the next humanitarian level.
Last
year, they partnered with San Diego jewelry designer Jennifer Housman
to launch a weekly jewelry-making class for local members of Project
Concern’s Women Empowerment Initiative which gives women the tools and resources they need to support themselves and their families.
Project
Concern provides the meeting space, Housman provides the instruction,
and Vavavida and Housman pay the expenses. The plan is to create a line
of jewelry and accessories that the women can make at home. They will be
paid by the piece, and Vavavida will sell the goods online. Didienne
and his partners are working on a Kickstarter campaign, and if all goes
according to plan, the line will launch in the fall.
In the
meantime, Didienne attends the classes, too. He is fluent in Spanish, so
he helps translate for the students, most of them immigrants from
Mexico. He also provides marketing input and interviews the women about
their lives, so their stories can be featured on the website along with
their handiwork.
The jewelry project is a work in progress, but the program has already produced some rare treasures.
“Antoine
has been consistently coming to meet with the women, and for them
consistency is so important, because consistency has been missing from
their lives,” said Jessica Rossier Uribe, who manages Project Concern
International’s United States and Border empowerment programs. “These
women have had a lot of trauma and abuse in their lives, but they feel
comfortable enough with Antoine to tell him their stories. They have
developed a strong relationship with him, which is amazing.”
Born
and raised in Lyon, France, Didienne got his ambition from his
hard-charging father, an executive in the plastics industry. His respect
for women started with his mother, who faced workplace discrimination
in her administration job, also in the plastics industry. His empathy
has its roots in the year he spent as an exchange student at
Williamsville East High School in East Amherst, N.Y.
“I loved the
feeling of being a pioneer. Being there took me away from the part of me
that was French, French, French and made me want to be a citizen of the
world,” Didienne said during an interview at the Claire de Lune Coffee
Lounge in North Park. “And it gave me an openness to other people and
cultures that I would not have discovered otherwise.”
He returned
to the United States in 1999 to attend the University of San Diego.
Didienne graduated with a degree in business administration in 2001,
worked for Yahoo for a year, then moved to Madrid. He worked for a
communications agency and got married. He and his wife, Glenda, returned
to San Diego in 2008 and he began studying for his master’s degree at
San Diego State. It was during a class in global ethics that another
piece of Didienne’s puzzle fell into place.
“That class really
shook things up for me. It was in the aftermath of the BP oil spill (of
2010) and the banking meltdown, and I thought, ‘I just can’t. I can’t
work for people like this.’ And then I thought, ‘I can’t talk about this
anymore. I have to do something about it.’”
In addition to
supporting small fair-trade companies, Vavavida donates products to
charity auctions and sponsors the Row for a Cure fundraiser benefiting Susan G. Komen
San Diego and its many breast-can hem as women who can make
something of themselves, as opposed to women who need something.”
